Byzantine wine.

Riain,

Your figures about Turkish production are grossly inaccurate;according to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Greece is in 14th position,Bulgaria is in 16th,Serbia is in 22nd and Turkey is in place...35
with considerably less than 10% of the Greek production.The last list published was April 2012 and it is the most recent one.
Byzantion would have been one of the top world producers since a strong Byzantine Empire surviving would have greatly limited Italian and especially French production;Through the Greek city of Massalia in southern France were exported up the river Rhone to Gaul more than ten million litres of wine per year in ancient times;Medieval western Europe imported great quantities of the first rate Greek wines from Athens Chios,Lemnos,Samos,Monemvasia,Laconia and Nemea.Byzantion with Greece as its principal producer,would have exported quality wines from 300 original varieties of wine producing grape vines
a greater variety and quality than any other country in the word and that is what it counts:quality.Original varieties by analogy is the difference between Malt and Blend whiskies...

France would have limited production because they wouldn't have the Grape vines that they took back due to the Latin Empire...
Southern Italy belonged to Byzantion and is the largest producing area in Italy...

last comment,the production of the Greek wine producing areas would have increased greatly if they woldn't have had the desruction from wesstern raids that regressed its production for hundreds of years...

What figure is grossly inaccurate? The Wiki wine production list has Turkey at 35th with less than 10% of Greek production, however the Wiki list on grape production has Turkey right up there with France in terms of planted acres but a bit below France in terms of tonnage. Presumably, since Turkey is such a minor wine producer, these are table grapes, raisins and the like. I'm no viticulturist but I'd assume that where you can grow table grapes you can grow wine grapes, so this a chunk of this Turkish production could be of wine varietals in a surviving Byzantine TL.
 
Here's the quote from Wikipedia guardian of all knowledge:

The earliest recorded mention of using resin with wine amphorae is by the first-century Roman writer Columella, who detailed in his work De Re Rustica (12,20,3 and 12,22,2) the different type of resin that could be used to seal a container or be mixed into the wine. He recommended, however that the very best wines should not be mixed with resin because of the unpleasant flavor introduced thereby. His contemporary, Pliny the Elder, does recommend the use of adding resin to the fermenting wine must in his work Naturalis Historia (14.124) with the resin from mountainous areas having a better aroma than those that come from lower lands (16.60).[1]

The Roman settlements in Illyria, Cisalpine Gaul and Gallia Narbonensis did not use resin coated amphorae due to the lack of suitable local pine trees and began to develop solid, less leak-prone wooden barrels in the 1st century RAD. By the 3rd century, barrel making was prevalent throughout the Roman Empire. The exception was the eastern empire regions of Byzantium which had developed a taste for the strong, pungent wine and continued to produce resinated wine long after the western Roman empire stopped. The difference in taste between the two empires took center stage in the work of the historian Liutprand of Cremona work Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana. In 968, Liutprand was sent to Constantinople to arrange a marriage between the daughter of the late Emperor Romanos II and the future Holy Roman Emperor Otto II. According to Liutprand, he was treated very rudely and undignified by the court of Nikephoros II being served goat stuffed with onion and served in fish sauce and "undrinkable" wine mixed with resin, pitch and gypsum—very offensive to his Germanic tastes.[1]

Pilgrims and Crusaders to the Holy Land during the Middle Ages recorded their experiences with the strong, resin wines of the Greek islands. Pietro Casola, an Italian noble who traveled to Jerusalem in 1494, wrote about the wines and cuisines of the places he stopped at along the way. In one of his entries, about his visit to Modone on Peloponnese, he wrote about the bounty of good quality wines made from Malmsey, Muscatel and Rumney varieties. Everything he tried was pleasing, except the strong, resinated wine with an unpleasant odor.[1]

Retsina is pretty ancient, it predates the non-resinated wine for the greco-roman world.
 

Kosta

Banned
Guys, you can buy wine from Greece and Turkey now.

When's the last time you did?

Two days ago.

Just because we can get Greek or Turkish wines doesn't mean we have a fully-developed window into East Roman wine-making. While the grapes might be the same, production and consumer tastes would be completely different. The very soil that any surviving Rhomanian wine-makers would be working with might be different due to different agricultural practices.
 
If they keep the core Byzantine areas of Greece, Bulgaria, Thrace and Turkey, they would likely produce double to the OTL combined total at a minimum. Far more likely they would make far more, without 400 years of Islamic sultans stamping out the wine making tradition of Asia Minor, no pun intended.

Keeping that core intact, and with it, millienia of Roman viticulture traditions, and the Byzantine wine industry would likely be one of the world's largest, with a reputation on par with Italian or Australian wines.
 
What figure is grossly inaccurate? The Wiki wine production list has Turkey at 35th with less than 10% of Greek production, however the Wiki list on grape production has Turkey right up there with France in terms of planted acres but a bit below France in terms of tonnage. Presumably, since Turkey is such a minor wine producer, these are table grapes, raisins and the like. I'm no viticulturist but I'd assume that where you can grow table grapes you can grow wine grapes, so this a chunk of this Turkish production could be of wine varietals in a surviving Byzantine TL.

The discussion is about wine,so I lay the figures of such production according to FAO.Do you know any better source? as for wiki...no self respecting researcher would ever look at such unreliable and unverifiable bunch of assortments called wiki and I suggest you do likewise...I hope you don't take offence as none has been intended and it is absolutely not personal.
 
The discussion is about wine,so I lay the figures of such production according to FAO.Do you know any better source? as for wiki...no self respecting researcher would ever look at such unreliable and unverifiable bunch of assortments called wiki and I suggest you do likewise...I hope you don't take offence as none has been intended and it is absolutely not personal.

Come on Wikipedia has good parts as well. De Re Rustica is available online if you want to check out where the first mention of resinated wine is, and luckily wiki provides you with which section and page it's on. Obviously it looks like some history major just dumped his/her research paper on it, but it's good to read that type of stuff.
 
The discussion is about wine,so I lay the figures of such production according to FAO.Do you know any better source? as for wiki...no self respecting researcher would ever look at such unreliable and unverifiable bunch of assortments called wiki and I suggest you do likewise...I hope you don't take offence as none has been intended and it is absolutely not personal.


May I suggest you look at the source cited in the Wiki article "List of wine-producing countries", you may be pleasantly surprised.
 
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May I suggest you look at the source cited in the Wiki article "List of wine-producing countries", you may be pleasantly surprised.

Yes Riain I saw it this morning,it is a copy of the FAO list which is attached
to the chapter of "Wine Producing Regions" in the FAO report which,Wikipedia
have made a mess(see the qualifying report at the heading,which constitutes a sad moment for any decent document...) with,I can only say that I just checked the Eastern Mediterranean regions and half the Greek ones are neither mentioned not marked...along with other missing ones of course!
 
May I suggest you look at the source cited in the Wiki article "List of wine-producing countries", you may be pleasantly surprised.

Yes Riain I saw it this morning,it is a copy of the FAO list which is attached
to the chapter of "Wine Producing Regions" in the FAO report which,Wikipedia
have made a mess(see the qualifying report at the heading,which constitutes a sad moment for any decent document...) with,I can only say that I just checked the Eastern Mediterranean regions and half the Greek ones are neither mentioned not marked...along with other missing ones of course!

Anyway,thanks for drawing my attention to that list...
 
Good enough for discussing the wine production of an empire which effectively died out 600 years ago.

Apparently Israeli wine was resurrected in the late 1800s by using French varietals. It would be cool if local varietals were still in existence.
 
Good enough for discussing the wine production of an empire which effectively died out 600 years ago.

Apparently Israeli wine was resurrected in the late 1800s by using French varietals. It would be cool if local varietals were still in existence.

Yes but wine producing aereas are the same and are still there doing what were doing at that time as well.

About Palestinian(Geographical term) varieties there should be some original ones from Crete and Cyprus although I have no information on that...
 
Wine originated in the Near East but today France, Italy and Spain are by far the biggest wine producers.

If Byzantium survived in a sizeable form would it be a wine producer on par with the OTL world leaders?

Or even wider, if Christian powers remained continuously in the Near and Middle East from about the Komnenian/Crusades era would the development of wine and the international market be significantly different?

I think the market would be different because tastes would be different. One thing I remember reading about wine in Roman times was that it varied massively from the cheap plonk an army marched with to a fine bottle a senator might by - there's a letter from a guy going from Egypt to Antioch which says something along the lines of the one posh bottle he bought cost the same as the wine for the soldiers for the entire journey.

I've forgotten why I just typed this...

Beset Rearguards
Grey Wolf
 
One other note about those missing Turkish grapes is that they might be going to make grape juice or other non-alcoholic table wines.

Or vinegar?

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Fine sentiment! I am just having my second glass of dry Muscat from Lemnos
after supper,curtusy of a friend who visited me here all the way from Greece for Easter celebrations...
 
Guys, you can buy wine from Greece and Turkey now.

When's the last time you did?

Maybe years ago. But Greece and Turkey are not the sum of the Balkan winemaking. I do buy that other stuff for budget options sometimes. And Muscat is good.

Though Italian tends to be cheaper and better, of course for everyday use. I can see your point.
 
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